Kathy Acker and Transnationalism1

Copyright 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved.
. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses
CHAPTER EIGHT
BETWEEN BEING AND SENSE:

INCEST, CAPITAL, AND SOVEREIGNTY
IN KATHY ACKERS EMPIRE OF
THE SENSELESS AND SUE WILLIAM
SILVERMANS BECAUSE I REMEMBER
TERROR, FATHER, I REMEMBER YOU
MAUREEN CURTIN
In her essay Sexual Aliens and the Racialized State: A Queer Reading
of the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act (2005), Siobhan B.
Somerville proposes to supplement the growing volume of queer
theoretical interventions which treat nation and sex as mutually
constitutive by advancing her own, more nuanced consideration of how
states are themselves sexualized. Inspired by the analysis Jacqueline
Stevens submits in Reproducing the State (1999), Somerville suggests that
we re-imagine the nation, not as a primordial given, but rather as an
permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
effect of the state, so that birth, family, and belonging come to be

understood as inherently political, as generated through juridical
formation.1 If Somervilles account suffers from a weakness, I would
locate it in the casual addendum to this formulation: the state is usually
understood to be a . . . political body with some territorial component.2
Of course, Somerville is merely reporting generally accepted provisos
here, but the characterization nevertheless seems to ascribe to territory
precisely that empirical status she and Stevens alike seek to contest in the
conventional understandings of nation. In other words, following the
primary thrust of Somervilles analysis, I want to extend her insights into
the state so that the territorial component, like the nation, can be
understood as political, a corollary of juridical formations rather than as an
empirical fact of geography, always already available for the movement of
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156 Chapter Eight
Copyright 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses
peoples which, in the apparent absence of political boundariesespecially

where superseded by capitalwe readily call flows. If, instead,
territories are imbricated in states and if states are, as Somerville contends,
embedded in, not separate, from sex, the transnational movement of
people inevitably increases the odds that sex, kinship, and the state will
mutate accordingly. Meanwhile, insofar as the resulting diasporas are
widely feared to be impure and inauthentic, as Gayatri Gopinath
suggests in her essay, Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational
Trajectories of Deepa Mehtas Fire (2002), the distance one travels from
home seems to require an intensification of kinship itself to preserve the
state; diaspora, for example, demands homophobic exclusions from public
spectacles like New York Citys 1995 India Day Parade and, perhaps more
notoriously, its St. Patricks Day parades of the early 1990s.3 Whereas for
Gopinath queerness is understood to undermine ones affiliation with a
state rapidly receding in diaspora and to threaten, by extension, ones
status as a good citizen of the new state, incest might well function as a
temporary suture, particularly where sovereignty shudders between a state
of exception and its extension across territory and thence into empire.4 I
aim here to examine how in two late twentieth-century, U.S. feminist
texts, incest emerges where sovereignty is troubled, circulating not so
much as taboo but as the salient feature of an order of pleasure which
knows no boundaries, an order wholly consistent with capital, and, thus an
imaginary order which has usurped, as psychoanalysis will tell us,
symbolic arrangements of all kinds, including, not least of all, what we
take to be politics itself.
Both Kathy Ackers novel, Empire of the Senseless (1988), and Sue
William Silvermans memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I
Remember You (1999), feature narrators transformed by incest in families
displaced by violent anti-Semitism. For reasons I will amplify in the
discussion that follows, neither text offers a coherent gloss on the link
between incest and anti-Semitism. Indeed, the two texts appear to have
little in common, notwithstanding Ackers penchant for genre-splattering
experiment which makes her projects commensurate with an array of
unlikely aesthetic interventions. For instance, if Ackers novels offer
ribald exposures, as Kathleen Wheeler puts it, and if the author herself
explicitly appealed to the importance of shock in awakening her
readers,5 Silvermans memoir, on the other hand, veers far from guerilla
tactics. Indeed, whereas Acker seems bent on imploding narratives of
causality and paradigms of development, including psychological
discourses and medical models that promote therapeutic recovery,
Silverman advances a narrative that makes healing its telos while
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Between Being and Sense 157
disavowing the political drama within which incest unfolds in her life.
Despite the texts shared emphasis on incest, then, we are compelled to
consider their divergence: Empire treats incest as incidental, a footnote to
a dramatization of the way capital has eroded the political in modern
states; whereas Silvermans Terror draws from a psychological palette to
make the trauma of incest its unremitting subject, consigning the political
to the anterior, to a note about her fathers role in shaping territories and
states from his position as lawyer in the U.S. Office of the Interior during
the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. These crucial differences
notwithstanding, both authors struggle to make incest and politics appear
together on the same stage.
The impossibility of incest and politics appearing together bears a
striking parallel to the impossibility the refugee poses politics; for Giorgio
Agamben, following Hannah Arendt, the refugee is that sole category in
which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political
community to come, a category that crystallized in the experience of the
Jews in the first part of the twentieth century.6 The central role that
stateless Jews play in Ackers and Silvermans accounts of incest suggest
that, by implication, the incestuous family also has something to reveal,
something at the interstices of sovereignty and capital and we can infer,
therefore, something about the forms and limits of the political community
in the midst of unraveling in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed,
the incestuous familys vertiginous oscillation between citizenship and
capital is one of the critical ways we can distinguish it from the refugee
who, as Arendt emphasized, stepped away from a new national identity
and chose rather decisively to resist assimilation. For all that Arendt
confers a kind of radical agency on the refugee, however, the choice to
resist assimilation would have been troubled in the historical context
Daniel Boyarin describes:
The situation of the European Diaspora male Jew . . . as politically

disempowered produced a sexualized interpretation of him as queer,
because political passivity was in Freuds world equated precisely with
homosexuality. . . . Diaspora is accordingly queer, and an end to Diaspora
would be the equivalent of becoming straight. . . . The fact, then, that
political Zionism was invented precisely at the time of the invention of
heterosexuality is entirely legible.7
Elaborating, and not especially in jest, Boyarin contends that for Freud,
Palestine was Phallustine. In Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker
dramatizes a familys initial reliance on capital, rather than Phallustine,
to weather Nazi-driven exile; the resulting slide into the imaginary that
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enables incest, commands pleasure, disables sexual difference, and

inaugurates piracy; and, finally, the emergence of bare life which
occasions a return to the phallus, something that seems to surprise even
Acker herself. Sue William Silverman likewise locates the onset of the
taboos violation in Eastern European pogroms in the first quarter of the
twentieth century; speculates about U.S. immigration protocols which
render each of her parents, before their marriage, under the same name;
fantasizes that escape from diaspora and into Palestine/Phallustine might
have preempted her own incest; implies a link between her fathers
political activities on behalf of U.S. sovereignty and his private
transgressions; and charts his complete disavowal of the phallus in his turn
toward piracy, that form of capital which facilitates freedom from politics
altogether. In the discussion that follows, I take the novel and memoir, in
turn, drawing heavily on reflections by feminist psychoanalytic critics in
dialogue with postmodern critics to examine how the impasses which
constitute sexual difference create an unrecuperable excess which, in turn,
eludes the relentless, cannibalizing insinuation of capital. As impasse, sex
curiously then becomes a condition for the renewal of the democratic state
which, under capital, has created in its wake what Agamben calls in Homo
Sacer bare life,8 a condition we might characterize as incests destiny.
Though Acker does not belabor the link between Jewish diaspora and
incest in Empire of the Senseless, she offers it as a premise and
immediately suggests its significance by casting the narrative in and as
cross-gendered ventriloquism, befitting not only the sexual confusion
which diaspora induces but also the dismantling of a sex/gender system
founded on the incest taboo. The novels narrator, Abhor, is cyborgpart
female and part robotbut she speaks first through a man, Thivai, who
rehearses the story of Abhors grandmother. We learn that as a child her
grandmother left Germany cause of all the pre-Nazi nationalist shit
murkiness. . . . Not exactly political exile. Voluntary . . . political exile.9

That the exile was voluntary suggests that Abhors great-grandparents,
at least, more closely resemble Arendts refugees than the figure of the
anxious, queer Jews which Boyarin proposes. Yet, a homeland in Palestine
does not lurk here, not even the phantom of one. For this reason it is hard
to assess whether wealth precludes the need to spurn nationalism or
whether the familys agency seems rooted in and contingent on their
wealth and, once penniless, their condition is that of exile. Once penniless,
Abhors grandmother is put out on the street, where, in a parody of an
eighteenth century novel, she first encounters romance and, in true
picaresque fashion, promptly loses her lover, except in this case to
modern, state-engineered brutality. She eventually escapes the street
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through marriage into a capitalist fortune and concludes, society is only a

filthy trick, by which she means not just a Shamela-esque deception, but,
rather, an arrangement wholly driven by impersonal, commercial exchange
(ES 6-7). She subsequently gives birth to a child whom she insulates from
castration and through whom she thus inaugurates a world based entirely
on cathexis:
Daddy was Nanas only kid. She adored him. She gave him everything she
could. He, in turn, turned to her as a mother turns to her child. They
formed a closed world. By the time daddy was born, Nana was very
wealthy. He was a beautiful boy: his hair was thick black and his eyes were
big black. Since he had turned to grandma rather than outward to the
world, he had no morals, for any morality presumes a society. (ES 8)
The parallel between this relationship and Freuds account of cathexis is

explicit and profound, so much so that Acker seems to be winking at us.
She first dramatizes the impact that that intense attachment has on syntax,
confounding analogical relations: He, in turn, turned to her as a mother
turns to her child (ES 8). The double turn prefaces an inverted analogy,
dramatizing a confusion of boundaries so that sex does not seem to obtain.
Together, Nana and Daddy form a closed world; whereas we can read
the syntax to suggest Nanas wealth is a force that, external to the circuit,
buttresses it, we might rather read the recapitulation of the initial
announcement of mother-child cathexisThey formed a closed world.
By the time Daddy was born, Nana was very wealthy (ES 8)as an
insistence on how intimately incest is predicated on capital.
Incest, conversely, abets capital, as we learn from the brief history of
Nanas education project or, rather, lack thereof:
Since my grandmother loved him, she saw no reason to teach him anything
or that he should learn anything. This substitution of primitivism which
must be anarchic (in its non-political sense) for morality gave my father
his charm. (ES 8)
Of course, we might observe, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

in their best-selling book, Empire (2001), that late capital no longer relies
on institutional state apparatuses like schools to achieve its ends and thus
education becomes attenuated, even superfluous, in the taboo-free world
of Abhors grandmother and Daddy.10 However, I submit that we must
also attend to the way that Nanas love obviates the pursuit of knowledge.
Joan Copjecs Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (1994)
offers an illuminating analysis on this point:
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It is on the next level, that of demand, that love is situated. Whether one
gives a child whose cry expresses a demand for love a blanket, or food, or
even a scolding, matters little. The particularity of the object is here
annulled; almost any will satisfyas long as it comes from the one to
whom the demand is addressed. . . . The indifferent objects are all received
as signs of the Others love. . . . [which] means that the objects come to
represent something more than themselves, that the Other now appears to
give something more than just these objects. . . . The something more is the
indeterminate part of its being (in Lacanian terms the object a), which the
Other (or subject) is but does not have, and therefore cannot give. Loves
deception, however, is that the object a can be given, that the Other can
surrender the indeterminate part of its being to the subject who thus
becomes the Others sole satisfaction, its reason to be. This relation is
reciprocal, with the subject also surrendering that which it lacks to the
Other.11
If under this delusion the indeterminate part of the subjects being can be
given, then in some crucial way its very communicability cancels its
indeterminacy and so, in their mutual homage to demand, Nana and Daddy
come to occupy the world of being or drive, a world in which sense,
or knowledge, no longer signify. As Copjec suggests later in Read My
Desire, a world of piracy and pleasure is a society
that commands jouissance as a civic duty [though civic] is . . . an

inappropriate adjective in this context, since these obscene importunings of
contemporary society entail the destruction of the civitas itself, of
increasingly larger portions of our public space. We no longer attempt to
safeguard the empty private space . . . but to dwell within this space
exclusively.12
Put another way, being reigns supreme in an empire of the senseless. The
intervention of the phallus would effectively sequester being, compensate

for the loss of pleasure incurred under loves deception by installing the
subject in relation to the sign, locate the subjects unassimilable
indeterminacy as the limit within language and as the spring of desire, and
yield knowledge. Abhor elucidates this perhaps best when she remarks,
Now I know that we, all of us, know more than we know we know, this is
human knowledge . . . (ES 11). Knowledge understood in this way
escapes its own tyrannical impetus to fix.
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Meanwhile, in the protracted absence of the phallus, Daddy acquires

neither knowledge nor morality but inhabits a sphere of unremitting
pleasure he protects through a gift system, which reproduces with his own
daughter the dynamic he enjoyed with Nana:
Daddy was coming into puberty. He inherited six million dollars. These
twomoney and sexmust have had something to do with each other,
cause from the night he lost his virginity, daddy never had trouble finding
lovers. Lovers were men and women to whom he gave gifts, not love or
need. Daddy, being daddy, needed no one. He wouldnt consider, just
cause of sex, being tied to any other human being. . . . When he was forty,
he got married because he wanted to propagate himself once. Sex was
joined to money. She married him because her mother desired this
marriage because his family was wealthier than theirs. She was fifteen.
Like my father, she worshipped her mother.
The only man she ever worshipped was my father. He didnt care about
her. He married her to have me. He cared about me. By him. His. He
educated me. . . . I looked like him. I smelled like him. I learned like him.
My father had propagated. (ES 8-9)
Daddys persistence in the imaginary ironically precludes both the

intimate and the social and what we might call participation in and/or
production of a civic sphere. Thus, even before he rapes Abhorthe only
signifier available to characterize his activity given Ackers experiment in
relinquishing the incest taboo, something reflected in the subtitle of this
section of the novel, Rape by the Fatherhe has induced the classic
narcissism of the imaginary, inculcating in his daughter the belief not only
that he can meet her every demand, but that she meets his simply by virtue
of being his likeness. What is more, in his sexual excitement, he screams:
I dont even recognize my own body!!! . . . and it doesnt matter!!! . . . I

know youre mine!!! . . . I made you!!! . . . Im making you!!! . . . I swore
Id live for pleasure. (ES 15, ellipsis in original)
In this scenario, what I have been calling cathexis seems to have shifted,
so that the structure that best accounts for the dynamic between Daddy and
Abhor is Lacans imaginary or mirror stage. More specifically, if in this
scene Daddy suffers from misrecognition, then his difficulty exceeds even
that of his earlier relationship with his mother in which boundaries were
difficult to detect; in this case, he is caught up in a rivalrous projection
with the Other, as Jane Gallop puts it in Reading Lacan (1985),13 and he
symptomatically asserts his mastery over his daughter by framing her as a
genetic cripple who is also dyslexic and autistic (ES 14). Thus
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underscoring Abhors limited access to the symbolic, to the world of signs,

Daddy invents these fictions for his activities in order to secure a world of
pleasure from the threat of interdiction which, Joan Copjec argues, might
emerge from the modern state which, ostensibly, administers an intensive
set of prohibitions to protect against the renewal of just such a primal
father, who figures pleasures and excess.14
The articulation of sex and money might be Daddys best security
against the modern state, of course. Linked explicitly in Abhors account
of symbolic incest between Nana and Daddy, the joining of sex and money
is the occasion for marriage between Abhors parents and seems a crucial
factor in stimulating a second, literal scene of incest, between father and
daughter this time. While the conjunction of sex and money is juxtaposed
with marriage and, implicitly, the sex/gender system, Acker eschews the
conventional critique of women as chattel in a commodity exchange to
caution that sex, joined to money, ceases to function as the limit. Already
she has established that capital can cost us politicsWealth was the price
and cost of political escape . . . the price and cost of capitalism (ES 3)
and in this we are reminded of Hardt and Negris observation:
Traditional cultures and social organizations are destroyed in capitals

tireless march . . . to create the networks and pathways of a single cultural
and economic system of production and circulation. Capital tends to reduce
all previously established forms of status, title, and privilege to the level of
the cash nexus, that is, to quantitative and commensurable economic
terms.15
Elsewhere, Hardt and Negri express cautious optimism about capital, and
this seems to inspire the remarkably ebullient assessment we find in
Michael Clunes Blood Money: Sovereignty and Exchange in Kathy
Acker (2004), a discussion in which the ongoing segmentation of labor

under globalization does not warrant even a pause:
In the context of the novel, this story tells the characters both where they
are and how they can get there. The free market with its fabulous
possibilities already exists, but it is covered over by the tentacles of the
society of control, the concerns and restrictions of a sinister sovereignty
that has penetrated and polluted all social relations. The hippies had
failed to see that sovereignty, whether it be reigning or revolutionary, is
the real threat to freedom; they had also failed to see the possibilities of an
alternative to any form of sovereignty. A world that is the mirror of our
sexuality, where there is no limit but the economic, remains just below the
surface.16
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Leaving aside gaps in Clunes analysis, including even his inattention to

the forms of ongoing segmentation Hardt and Negri acknowledge, his final
point is compelling, and yet it depends on a sleight-of-hand. First, he does
not register precisely a critical signifier here: for Acker, it is war, not the
world, which serves as a mirror of our sexuality (ES 26). What is
more, elsewhere in the utopia he conjures, Clune suggests that a capitalist
economy lacks limits, but, here, he characterizes the economic as itself a
limit, even, indeed, as the only salient one. Ackers invocation of war as
mirror of sexuality is much more apropos, something Copjec confirms
in her remarks about sex as oppos[ed] to sense and by definition,
opposed to relation, to communication.17 Sex, in other words, is an aporia
or, better still, sex forms a limit or impasse; while this means an empty
entity disjoined from the signifier which would seem to suggest a
capacity for the mutability we associate with capitalsex cannot be
treated as equivalent to capital.18 Moreover, insofar as Communication
is, according to Hardt and Negri, the form of capitalist production in
which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to
its regime, further impos[ing] a continuous and complete circulation of
signs,19 then sex might best be seen as a resistance to capital, a crucial
figure for the emergence of democracy in an era of globalization. But
when the incest taboo disappears, eclipsed by the order of the drive, so too
goes the hedge against capital and the underlying condition of
democracyundecidability, and not, as Copjec reminds us, the
multiplicity which Hardt and Negri hail.
For understandable reasons, of course, sovereignty is a haunting
specter for many, presiding over the split between citizen and human with
such a high degree of organization that state violence has been mass
produced to target populations with enormous efficiency. The pirate is a
figure who would seem to offer some kind of resistance to the specter of
sovereignty by virtue of his allegiance nowhere and, indeed, would seem,

therefore, to embody the undecidability Copjec champions. Piracy, of
course, has many fans among Ackers critics, especially where it is seen,
on the one hand, to confound the sex-gender system and, on the other, to
signal a free market which, in Michael Clunes words, supplants the
arbitrary distinctions of a nightmarish sovereignty.20 Exemplifying the
former position in her essay, The Territory Named Womens Bodies:
The Public and Pirate Spaces of Kathy Acker (2004), Marjorie
Worthington insists that the authors pirates are, foremost, women intent
on contesting the way their bodies [have] become the territory for a male-
ruled regime . . . open and vulnerable to whatever male clients, fathers, or
doctors would care to do them.21 Piracy is here formulated as a feminist
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164 Chapter Eight
response to incest, among other incursions, as well as a repudiation of

territory. Whereas territory seems to take at least a titular place in
Worthingtons discussion, excerpted as it is from Ackers Empire, the
critic nevertheless fails to register territory as a signifier and thus does not
account for its political dimension. Instead, Worthington eschews territory
for space in a discussion that, particularly in the citation concluding this
excerpt, echoes a concern Siobhan Somerville voices:
Geography, the study of the concerns of space, has been termed by Kant
the nebeneinander, one thing next to another. In other words, the concerns
of space are metonymical, as things in space exist next to one another,
touching, overlapping, moving closer to and further away from each other.
As Foucault has said, space consists of juxtaposition, near and far, and
the side-by-side.22 Instead of being linear in nature, space ebbs and
flows, waxes and wanes; it does not move in a single direction, but is
characterized by simultaneity. Edward Soja describes spatiality this way:
Spatiality . . . always remains open to further transformation in the
contexts of material life. It is never primordially given or permanently
fixed.23
Worthington is headed toward a feminist translation of Kant, Foucault, and

Soja, yoking the metonymic principle intrinsic to geography with the
metonymy which, according to Luce Irigaray, structures the female body
and its pleasures.24 Notwithstanding her persuasiveness in contesting
Cartesian constructions of space, though, Worthington cannot fully escape
the tendency to empiricize: things in space and the relations among those
things are here conflated with space itself, and, more troublingly, she
attributes to women who defy patriarchal law and become pirates the
ambulatory properties of the space they traverse.
That space for Worthington can give rise to a metonymic shift from
privacy to piracy suggests just how powerful is the tendency to read space
as primordial or, at least, as a given. Ironically, we see this same tendency
in contemporary discourses on territory, that very signifier which
Worthington elides in her metaphoric turn to space. For instance, on
November 24, 2007, the Associated Press (AP) quoted Lebanons
presidential spokesman, Rafik Shalala, thus: Because a state of
emergency exists all over the land, the army is instructed to preserve
security all over the Lebanese territory.25 The state of emergency Shalala
invokes is attributed to the territory, as though a state of exception were
not entirely a function of a sovereigns declaration, albeit an outgoing
sovereign. The AP reporter gets in on the act, too, remarking:
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The fight has put Lebanon into dangerous, unknown territory: both sides
are locked in bitter recriminations, accusing the other of breaking the
constitution, and they are nowhere near a compromise on a candidate to
become head of state.26
Both Shalala and the AP imply not only that the state of emergency is the
natural condition of territory but that territory, in turn, demands a
particular responsetotalizing security measures. While the AP account
poses, in many respects, a radically different perspective on space from
Worthingtons, I nevertheless liken its mistake to hers inasmuch as neither
account reckons adequately with the constitutive force of the political,
whether in territory, space, or even the state of exception.27 That said,
Worthingtons mistake issues from a different occlusion than that of the
AP and its subjects: she subscribes to a conception of the private as
feminized, devalued, and unredeemable, failing to see the extent to which,
as Copjec remarks, what was once private has proliferated so widely that it
usurps the civic space where politics might occur. Thus, to disavow the
private in the pirate, as Worthington does in her metonymic shift from the
former to the latter, is to offer something neither radical nor subversive,
but rather to affirm an order that makes politics impossible.
Where incest, symbolic and literal, links the imaginary and capital as
well as the private and pirate in Empire of the Senseless, the incest Sue
William Silverman both imagined (in diaspora) and incurred (across a
sovereign state and a territory) links the imaginary and empire to piracy
in her 1996 memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember
You. The memoir provides an account of a coerced, incestuous relationship
authored by her father, Irwin Silverman, whose political work was never
far from piracy and who gravitated, ultimately, toward the latter. That is,
in his imperialist work for the U.S. Office of the Interior and, later, as a
founding member of the West Indies Bank and Trust Company, Irwin
Silverman was responsible for organizing varying degrees of statehood for
territories the United States plundered in places as far flung as Alaska,
Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (then the
West Indies). Rather than suggest an ironic gap between his legal and
banking careers and his paternal activity, the way Sue William seems to, I
argue that Irwin Silvermans administrative skill in deploying those
instruments which confound the distinction between friend and
enemythe distinction Carl Schmitt claimed to be so fundamental to
the political at the beginning of the twentieth centurymirrors the
distinctions he confounded in the family.28 If, as capital increasingly
usurped the space between friend and enemy, Irwin Silverman was
engaged in piracy rather than either the political or the patriarchal, then he
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166 Chapter Eight
anticipates the figures Acker dramatizes and critiques in Empire.

Furthermore, while it is Irwin Silvermans incestuous relationship with his
daughter that takes center stage in Terror, Sue William also conjures from
a few sketchy details the narrative of her own grandmothers incestuous
relationship with Irwin Silverman, in a remarkable parallel with Ackers
Empire. Sue William imagines her grandmother committing incest with
her father in the context of pogroms that had already prompted Sues
grandfather to emigrate from outside Kiev to the U.S., with plans to bring
his family after:
I imagine my father, that small boy in Russia, after his father left the
family to move to America. My father is alone with his mother. His mother
is frightened shell never see her husband again, and so she turns, of
course, to her son for comfort. And he will comfort her. He will do
whatever is asked to stop his mothers weeping, to sponge up his mothers
fear. And his mother? What had happened to her, what began the cycle, the
long downward spiral, to me? They are Russian peasants. They live in
long, dark Russian winters where a Czars army stages pogroms to kill
Jews.29
Sue William Silverman answers her own query about what precipitated her
experience of incest by invoking a history of class, political, and ethnic
conflict as well as a narrative of emigration. In such moments, she moves
beyond the central scene with her psychologist, which structures so much
of the memoir, to speculate about the role of politics in incest and, though
she does not sustain the inquiry, she cannot seem to help wondering about
how states and statelessness have precipitated her fathers incestuous
activities.
In States of Fantasy (1998), Jacqueline Rose offers a model for such
analysis, remarking that the impersonal modern democratic state relies on
fantasy to bind its subjects in the forging of [a] collective will, for
sovereignty is a fiction, an as if phenomenon, she says, and thus requires
maintenance; nowhere is this more in evidence, Rose contends, than in the
case of Israel.30 Drawing on Freud to elucidate her insights into the role of
fantasy in statehood, not unlike Boyarin in his essay on queer Jewish
diaspora, Rose addresses the way Freuds loss of state-affiliation informed
his theory, remarking on this shift in his perspective on a homeland:
Read through the filter of the present, [Moses and Monotheism] seems like
an advance warning, a caution against the belief that statehood could ever
be the total psychic redemption of its people. Freud was sympathetic to
Zionism and by 1935, when Nazism was established, he was in favour of a
Jewish nation state in Palestine, but earlier in the 1930s he had spoken out
Account: s7527301
against the idea. Driven into exile, it is as if he were almost demonstrating

in his person how loss, historic deprivation, transmute themselves into
necessity, one which soonhe did not live to see itwould entrench itself
beyond all negotiable reach. The state, lost in reality, turns into metaphor
and takes refuge deep within.31
In this gloss, Rose offers a perspective on the paradoxical appeal and

alarm of the modern state. But, to reiterate an invaluable suggestion of
Copjecs, if the state is instituted through the slaughter of a primal father
who figures pleasure and excess and whose authority rests in his person,
and if the modern state administers a network of interdictions against the
return of that father and what he embodies,32 then it is not easy to discern
how exile or reprieve from such interdictions would result in what Rose
calls deprivation. Indeed, this would seem an ideal occasion for jouissance
and perhaps even for the incipience of piracy. Yet for Rose, Freuds loss is
not difficult to fathom because, as she puts it,
talk of the postmodern predicamentbelonging everywhere and nowhere

at the same timehas never felt quite right. There is something about this
vision of free-wheeling identity which seems bereft of history and of
passion. As if the anxiety of belonging . . . could be redeemed in the
present by dispersal, the heart miming, shadowing, beating to the tune of a
world whose contours can no longer confidently be drawn. . . . But it is far
from clear that the mind leaps from here into freedom. Hearts can retrench;
the body which feels weak rearms itself. The carapace of selfhood and
nations cannot be willeddoes not fall so easily away.33
In this way, her own resistance to the siren call of Israel notwithstanding,
Rose accounts for the allure of statehood for those in the diaspora and
helps us register an extraordinary moment in Silvermans memoir, when
Sue William reports on her parents wedding in the U.S. and subsequent
honeymoon travels around Europe, with Palestine their ultimate
destination:
In my fathers desk I discover . . . a honeymoon journal kept by my father

when he and my mother sailed to Palestine [featuring] a short item from an
October 27, 1933, Chicago newspaper:
CHICAGO ATTORNEY AND BRIDE PLAN TO LIVE IN
PALESTINE
Irwin Silverman, young Chicago attorney, and Fay Silverman, who are
to be married Sunday in the home of the brides parents, 515 S. Central
Ave., plan to make their home in Palestine. Immediately after the wedding
they will leave for a honeymoon in Ireland, France, Italy, Switzerland,
Account: s7527301
168 Chapter Eight
Greece, Turkey, Smyrna, and Egypt. From there they will go to Palestine,
where Silverman plans to join a firm of attorneys. (BT 231-2)
When Sue William reads this, she fantasizes about a squall which,
intervening in the moments before their departure, might have elicited
resources in her parents that would have proven crucial to protecting the
children they would eventually have, but far more telling is her deflated
speculation: Maybe if theyd never returned to the States, maybe if theyd
stayed overseas, then they would have been different (BT 231-2). In Sue
Williams extraordinary revision, Jewish statehood in Palestine would
have served sufficiently as the law-of-the-father, inducing the incest taboo
and thereby preserving her from years of rape and torture.
Instead, Irwin Silverman returned to the U.S. where, at the behest of
the sovereign, he set about an ambitious transnational agenda in the Office
of the Interior, conducting legal activities for two decades that were
directed at expanding what counted as the states interior by making
broader and broader claims on what were taken to be territories. In this
respect, the command to expand the U.S. interior past its contiguous
boundaries must have resonated profoundly with Silverman for whom the
world of private pleasure knew fewer and fewer bounds, for whom private
pleasure was becoming increasingly exteriorized. We need look no further
than the structure of the memoir itself which features Irwin Silvermans
biography as a paratext for Sue Williams narrative within. In perhaps the
only place Sue William seems to want to shock us, she glosses her fathers
politics with a simple, dramatic claim about incest, a juxtaposition which
turns out to be an altogether plausible way to gloss the relationship
between incest and politics:
From 1933 to 1953 my father was Chief Counsel to the Secretary of the
Interior. He was architect of the preliminary papers establishing statehood

for Alaska and Hawaii. He assisted in the plans for Philippine
independence, helped create the Puerto Rican Commonwealth, and worked
to implement home rule for the Virgin Islands, Guam, and Samoa. He also
helped establish civilian rule of Japanese possessions after World War II.
From 1954 to 1958 my father was president of the West Indies Bank and
Trust Company. After leaving the West Indies, he became president of the
Saddle Brook Bank and Trust Company in New Jersey. I have photographs
of my father with President Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Governor
Richard J. Hughes of New Jersey, Senator Henry Scoop Jackson. My
father was also a child molester, I know. Because he sexually molested me.
(BT xv)
Account: s7527301
Sue William is perhaps naively sanguine about the extent to which her
fathers legal inscriptions conferred sovereignty and home rule around
the world, for, though Alaska and Hawaii both acquired the status of states
within the sovereign U.S., the other sites of Silvermans exteriorizing
drive hardly enjoyed the independence she attributes here. Rather, Irwin
Silvermans memos and legal documents were, in at least one case,
responsible for the displacement of peoplefrom Viequesand,
elsewhere, allowed the U.S. to confer quasi-sovereign status on contiguous
populations whose capital we extracted, whether directly via economic
arrangements or indirectly via military bases. Finally, there is no small
irony in Irwin Silverman conducting these activities first under the
auspices of the Office of the Interior and later as president of the West
Indies Bank and Trust Company, given that he is, himself, compelled by
the drive to jouissance, by the order of being, an order that ushers pleasure
from the private and internal realm so that it can usurp the public or civic
space.
Irwin Silvermans eventual shift from law maker to law breaker, from
sovereign to pirate, was first spurred on, Sue William implies, by the U.S.
nationalization process which functions as a stimulus to and locus for
incest. She observes, for example, that long before their marriage both her
parents surnames were altered by immigration officials,
redefining their parents identities by baptizing each family Silverman. I

want to ask my parents if part of the attraction between them was a
narcissistic whiff of incest: we are the same name; you are me; and I am
only capable of loving my own image. (BT 233)
One might even say that Sue Williams parents suffered the same fate as
Freud, whom Jane Gallop remarks in Reading Lacan, is assimilate[d] by
America,34 where we translate difference into our own idiomeffecting

an ideal identificationthat same mechanism of projection which
structures the imaginary or mirror stage on display in the orgiastic scene
between Daddy and Abhor in Ackers Empire. This very structure, Gallop
contends, characterizes the form of ego psychology which came to
dominate American psychoanalysis, despite Freuds laments and, later,
Lacans more vigorous criticism.
In this perspective on psychoanalysis and America, Gallop seems to
differ from Joan Copjec who contends that in the American form of
democracy we valorize our myriad differences as citizens under the aegis
of individualism and a concomitant narcissism fuel[ing] that single-
minded and dangerous defense of difference that so totally isolates us from
our neighbors.35 Assimilation, then, owes itself to a narcissistic drive on
Account: s7527301
170 Chapter Eight
the side of Americans, but then so too does the bourgeois defense of
difference, a contradiction which is instructive about the dynamics of the
imaginary or mirror stage where the subject emerges through an illusory
but nevertheless constitutive identification with an idealized Other, an
image of plenitude, coherence, mobility, and mastery, which is, at once,
inverted, alien, and antagonistic.36 In its original instantiation, the child
fluctuates between feeling disappointment with the inadequate Other and
feeling menaced by its insuperable status; however, the moments of dis-
identification do not amount to an escape from the imaginary, regardless
of how much the subject is predisposed to believe that freedom from the
source of tension and conflict might reside in its own singularity. For
Irwin Silverman, such moments of dis-identification never seem to
materialize, as his deathbed observation reminds Sue: [Your mother] and
I were like glass and water. His smile is small, almost timid. You and I
are exactly alike (BT 235). In the former case, his wife functions as a
kind of containment to limit his enjoyment; nor is she a looking glass in
the same way that, it would seem, Sue William is. If, on the other hand, it
is tempting to characterize Irwin Silvermans political and banking
activities as emerging from dis-identification, his deathbed appellation for
his daughteralbeit plucked from an inchoate state of mindreminds us
that we cannot so easily disentangle the work he undertook in the Office of
the Interior from his work at home: he calls Sue William Josephine
Missouri (BT 236). Though Sue William suggests this is a meaningless
name. A random selection of words pieced together in the jumble of a
mind (BT 236), I want to read it as an insistent claim about his own
belonging to the heartland of the U.S. sovereign and as a disavowal of the
extent to which his myriad activities worked to undo sovereignty itself.
For Irwin Silverman, incest guarantees him America; for Sue William, the
chiasmus is more apt: America made Irwin Silverman incestuous; for our
purposes, incest makes Irwin Silverman a pirate and America obsolete.37

If, meanwhile, Irwin Silvermans unbounded imaginary offers him
enjoyments in lieu of freedom, we ought not be surprised that dis-
identification for the sake of singularity does not tempt him. Kathy Acker
explains in an interview with Ellen Friedman (1989) that singularity as
freedom is a fantasy for those with an internal critique of U.S. sovereignty:
Say, the hippie movement in which the goal was that you make things
better by isolating yourself from society and going your own way. The
same sort of thing with the separatist feminists. You form your own group.
In the end . . . it cant work successfully. Neither one is in any way a viable
model of true separation. Its impossible. In the same way you try to
imagine or construct a society that wasnt constructed according to the
Account: s7527301
myth of the central phallus. Its just not possible when you live in this
world. Thats what I wanted to do in the second section of Empire, but the
CIA kept coming in. Thats what I mean by the CIA being symbolic. It
could have been anybody. So I ended up with Pirate Night, You cant get
to a place, to a society, that isnt constructed according to the phallus
[sic].38
That Acker invokes the phallus here may seem rather surprising,
especially after seeing the same interview invoked to very different effect
in Michael Clunes argument. We may be surprised moreover, because of
how adamantly Acker had planned the first part of the novel to read as an
elegy for the world of patriarchy and the second as a glimpse of what
society would look like if it werent defined by oedipal considerations.39
Ackers experiments in exorcizing taboo, of course, have attracted far
more critical attention than the return of/to the phallus and perhaps none
more than the incest between Abhor and her father, a relationship which,
for critics like Clune augurs a world that resonates with the extraordinary
freedom posed by capitalism.40 In the course of her experiments in
Empire, though, Acker confirms Copjecs insights: capital issues its own
commandsto enjoy and take pleasurefrom the order of the drive and
tyrannizes even more powerfully than the old modern order of desire,
ruled over by the Oedipal father (ES 183). In the concluding section of
this discussion, I explore Ackers conception of the CIA as representative
of the phallus to consider how it might be a corrective to forms of
sovereignty which conflate place and society, an indistinction that met
its extreme incarnation in the Nazi camps but now, in Giorgio Agambens
famous critique of bare life, obtains far more pervasively.41
In Ackers novel and Silvermans memoir turns, eventually, to the
narrators cutting and bloodletting, as they try to make the body
communicate without the phallus; while this is a common feminist trope

for empowerment, we would do well, nonetheless, to consider it as
evidence of the prevailing power of biopolitics, which collapses the
classical distinction between zoe and bios, between private life and
political existence.42 For Agamben, of course, the primacy of bare life,
figured most dramatically in the Nazi camps, now commonly seen
instantiated at Guantanamo Bay, and everywhere relevant, is the effect of
the violence at the heart of sovereignty:
Like the concepts of sex and sexuality, the concept of the body too is
always already caught in a deployment of power. The body is always
already a biopolitical body and bare life, and nothing in it or the economy
of its pleasure seems to allow us to find solid ground on which to oppose
the demands of sovereign power. In its extreme form, the biopolitical body
Account: s7527301
172 Chapter Eight
of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of

absolute indistinction between law and fact, juridical rule and biological
life. . . . In the camps, city and house became indistinguishable, and the
possibility of differentiating between our biological body and our political
bodybetween what is incommunicable and mute and what is
communicable and sayablewas taken from us forever.43
The distinction between sex and body with which Agamben begins in this
excerpt is curious, particularly when we consider that he characterizes the
biological body in precisely those terms Joan Copjec characterizes sex: as
incommunicability itself.44 I would add that not only would it be surprising
if the economy of the bodys pleasure were invested in the formation of
solid ground but I wish to observe, also, that bare life, if once sponsored
by sovereignty, is propelled now by capital. It is, furthermore, surprising
that Agamben would invoke the trope, solid ground, given his
considered rejection of sovereignty as violent, not just in terms of its
treatment of its subjects, but in its constitutive acts of drawing boundaries
to enclose space in the name of order. His notions of extra-territoriality
and the disappearance of citizenship altogether, along with Hardt and
Negris optimism about the way that communication attacks the very
possibility of linking an order to a space,45 make my invocation of the
phallic law to stymie incestuous parents and imperialist states suspicious,
at a minimum, and perhaps even wildly mistaken in the eyes of many. But
if we return to Ackers interview with Ellen Friedman and the novelists
not-so-casual remark about the way the CIA not only intrudes in Empire
but also represents the return of the phallus, I think we see how the writer
offers a trope for the kinds of indeterminacy which Copjec insists is
paramount to the maintenance of democracy. That is, the Central
Intelligence Agency figured in the novel functions something like the
unconscious, knowing more than it knows it knowsfull knowledge

constantly deferredand thereby enabling the kinds of indeterminacy
which protect democratic states from sliding into totalitarian ones while
also preempting the exquisite suffering of those in a world with no
boundaries at all.
At the risk of shifting too glibly from a psychoanalytic take on the CIA
as a literary figure of indeterminacy to a painstaking consideration of an
architectural analysis of politics in the Middle East, I am nonetheless
inspired by Acker and Silverman to close my discussion by invoking the
recent, brilliant work of Eyal Weizman, whose work in Hollow Land:
Israels Architecture of Occupation (2007), examines the inverse of the
scenario I have just described: doubly and triply reinforced boundaries,
which effect and extend colonial aims in and across multiples dimensions
Account: s7527301
simultaneously. Obviously well acquainted with postmodern and political

theory focused on de-territorialization, including work like that of Deleuze
and Guattari and Agamben, Weizman advances a well-nuanced analysis of
the mobile and permeable boundaries meant to segregate Israel from
Palestine at the inception of the twenty-first century. For Weizman, state
security measures, including the Wall, have effected
a discontinuous and fragmented series of self-enclosed barriers that can be

better understood as a prevalent condition of segregation. . . . the face of
the territory has grown to resemble maps more redolent of Scandinavian
coastlines, where fjords, islands, and lakes make an inconclusive
separation between water and islands. . . . The settlement islands encircled
by depth barriers were declared by the IDF to be special security zones
and the area extending 400 meters around them to be sterile. Beyond the
hygiene neurosis suggested by the term, its definition means that the
military and the settlements civil militias may, without warning, shoot-to-
kill any Palestinian who happens to stray into these zones.46
For scholars like Somerville and Stevens, the language of sterility would
likely signify something more than a hygiene neurosis and Weizmans
casual dismissal might confirm their sense that the sexual is that which
traditional accounts of politics repress. But I am more interested ultimately
in Weizmans phrasing of Israels emerging architecture as discontinuous
and fragmented, especially insofar as these effects aid a separatist project.
Troubled, like Acker and Copjec, by the drive to segregation or
separatism, Weizman seems to attribute that drive to an ongoing
disarticulation of the political from the territorial or as he puts it far more
precisely, Under this arrangement, the traditional perception of political
space as a contiguous territorial surface, delimited by continuous
borderlines, is no longer relevant.47 Where this certainly resonates with
Agambens analysis and perhaps even Worthingtons discussion and,

while the arrangement speaks, also, to the work Irwin Silverman was up to
in the Office of the Interior, I want to call particular attention to
Weizmans suggestion that
Palestinians are right to question whether it would not be better if the

Palestinian Authority dismantled itself completely until conditions for full
sovereignty are met. Dismantling the Authority would place responsibility
for government of the territories squarely in Israeli hands. . . . A call to
reconnect the concepts of security control and government, and amend the
split described within the function of sovereignty, is not a call for a return
to nineteenth-century type imperialism, with its technologies of
government and production of colonial subjects. It is rather a call for
Account: s7527301
174 Chapter Eight
power either to assume the expensive full responsibility for the people
under its security control or to avoid security action when it cannot, is
unable or unwilling to do so.48
In Weizmans curious proposal to cede authority where it allows sovereign

power to veil itself, I cannot escape echoes of Gallops Lacanian-inspired
exhortation to unveil the phallus so that its authority will have more
difficulty pronouncing itself, the difficulty Kathy Acker embraces in
Empire of the Senseless, a difficulty similar to the undecidability which
sex, rather than incest, offers us.49
Finally, though I cannot do justice to Weizmans argument here, I do
want to conclude by marking out a horizon for future discussion. Whereas
Weizman expresses not only skepticism but also anxiety about the
sovereign archipelagos which have sprung up as the Wall coalesces,
some feminists, including Sylvia Martin and Sue William Silverman
herself, experiment with the archipelago or island as a figure of liminality
which, benefitting from the mirror built into the islands horizons at the
conjunction of land and sea, unsettles identity and counters the
tyranny of completeness.50 Whether this sovereign archipelagos might
be conducive to forms of belonging that neither foreclose nor exhaust,
while fostering spaces metonymically and somehow just beyond the
grasping control of both the incestuous father and transnational capital
whether in the person of imperialists, bankers, or those pirates to whom
the former outsource the coercionremains a question worth exploring.
Works Cited
Acker, Kathy. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove Press, 1988.
Agamben, Giorgio. We Refugees. Translated by Michael Rocke, 1994.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-we-refugees.html.
. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
Arendt, Hannah. We Refugees. 1943. In The Jew as Pariah: Jewish
Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, edited by R.H. Feldman, 55-
67. New York: Grove Press, 1978.
Boyarin, Daniel. Outing Freuds Zionism, or, the Bitextuality of the
Diaspora Jew. In Queer Diasporas, edited by Cindy Patton and
Benigno Snchez-Eppler, 71-104. Durham: Duke University Press,
2000.
Clune, Michael. Blood Money: Sovereignty and Exchange in Kathy
Acker, Contemporary Literature 45, no.3 (Fall 2004): 488-515.
Account: s7527301
Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1994.
Foucault, Michel. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16 (Spring 1986): 22-7.
Friedman, Ellen G. A Conversation with Kathy Acker. The Review of
Contemporary Fiction 9, no.3 (1989): 12-22.
Gallop, Jane. Reading Lacan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Gopinath, Gayatri. Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational
Trajectories of Deepa Mehtas Fire. In Queer Globalizations:
Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, edited by Arnaldo Cruz-
Malav and Martin F. Malansan IV, 149-161. New York: New York
University Press, 2002.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001.
Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter
with Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Martin, Sylvia. Islands and Belonging: A Reflection on the Islands of
Ibiza and Tasmania, 2007, http://islandmag.com/107/essay.html.
Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. 1927. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2007.
Silverman, Sue William. Because I Remember Terror, Father, I
Remember You. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1999.
. Archipelago. Brevity 17 (Spring 2005). http://www.creativenon
fiction.org/brevity/brev17/silverman_arch.htm.
Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies. New York: Verso, 1989.
Somerville, Siobhan B. Sexual Aliens and the Racialized State: A Queer
Reading of the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act. In Queer
Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings, edited
by Eithne Luibhid and Lionel Cant Jr., 75-91. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Stevens, Jacqueline. Reproducing the State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University, 1999.
Weizman, Eyal. Hollow Land: Israels Architecture of Occupation. New
York: Verso, 2007.
Wheeler, Kathleen. Reading Kathy Acker. Context: A Forum for
Literary Arts and Culture 9 http://www.centerforbookculture.org/
context/no9/wheeler.html.
Worthington, Marjorie. The Territory Named Womens Bodies: The
Public and Pirate Spaces of Kathy Acker. Literature Interpretation
Theory 15 (2004): 389-408.
Account: s7527301
176 Chapter Eight
Notes
1. Somerville, Sexual Aliens, 75.

2. Ibid., 76. The italics are mine.
3. Gopinath, Local Sites, 150.
4. Somerville explores the history of the U.S. governments reliance on medical
pathology to exclude suspected homosexuals from immigrating into the state: The
[1952] committees discussions focused on obscure language inherited from the
Immigration Act of 1917 . . . [and the] language of psychopathic personality, it
contended, would be sufficiently broad to provide for the exclusion of
homosexuals and sex perverts (80).
5. Kathleen Wheeler, Reading Kathy Acker.
6. Agamben quotes in his essay, We Refugees. See also Arendts essay by the
same title We Refugees, 55-67.
7. Boyarin, Outing Freuds Zionism, 78.
8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, passim.
9. Acker, Empire of the Senseless, 3 (hereafter cited in text as ES).
10. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 329.
11. Copjec, Read My Desire, 148.
12. Ibid., 183.
14. Gallop, Reading Lacan, 59.
17. Clune, Blood Money, 488.
19. Ibid., 207.
22. Worthington, The Territory, 397.
23. Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 22.
24. Somerville, Sexual Aliens, 122.
25. Irigaray, This Sex, 100.

26. The article, Lebanon Leader: Nation in State of Emergency, was updated
on msnb.com at 8:26pm ET, on Friday, November 23, 2007 at
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21940024/.
27. Ibid., http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21940024/
28. One only need note Siobhan Somervilles citation of Jacqueline Stevens
Reproducing the State. Territory is cited in the index twenty-two times,
including a fourteen page section dedicated to a discussion of the laws on
citizenship in six nations. As Stevens observes, where parental citizenship is not
invoked, territory is, which underscores the extent to which territory is
conceptualized along the same coordinates as family and, particularly,
intergenerationality (233-47).
Account: s7527301
29. In The Concept of the Political (1927), Carl Schmitt contends, The specific
political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that
between friend and enemy. . . . The distinction of friend and enemy denotes the
utmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or
dissociation (26). Whereas Jacqueline Stevens offers the family as a paradigm for
the state in counterpoint to the kind of friend-enemy distinction Carl Schmitt offers
up, I would argue that the two paradigms might be better understood in terms of
the poles of cathexis and castration which psychoanalysis provides.
30. Silverman, Because I Remember Terror, 204 (hereafter cited in text as BT).
31. Rose, States of Fantasy, 3.
32. Ibid., 12.
34. Rose, States of Fantasy, 2.
35. Gallop, Reading Lacan, 58.
37. Gallop, Reading Lacan, 78-9.
38. In a curious coincidence, Sue William Silverman has indicated in
correspondence that some of her fathers papers are housed in the Truman
Presidential Memorial Library in Independence, Missouri, but, to date, the library
has no documentation to corroborate this claim. Reading psychoanalytically, I
might expect, rather, to find commemorated there some residue of the Sue William
Silverman who barely escaped her father.
39. Acker, A Conversation, 17.
40. Ibid., 17.
42. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 187.
43. Ibid., 187.
44. Ibid., 187-8.
47. Weizman, Hollow Land, 177.
48. Ibid., 177.

49. Ibid., 158.
50. Gallop is particularly addressing the notorious question of the relation between
the phallus and the penis, but her overriding concern throughout is with authority
and, if not the possibility of an ethics of authority then a politics: Lacan has said
the phallus can play its role only when veiled. The supposed universality of the
pronoun he depends on its not connoting the penis, on the veiling of its male
sexual attributes. When any possible pronoun for the epistemological subject
cannot help but connote sexual difference, then the phallic authority of universal
man will have more difficulty pronouncing itself (21).
51. Martin, Islands and Belonging, http://islandmag.com/107/essay.html.
Additionally, Sue William Silverman invites continued consideration in
Account: s7527301
178 Chapter Eight
Archipelago, http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev17/silverman_arch.
htm.
Account: s7527301

Kathy Acker and Transnationalism1

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Kathy Acker and Transnationalism1

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Copyright 2009. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. All rights reserved.

BETWEEN BEING AND SENSE:

effect of the state, so that birth, family, and belonging come to be

peoples which, in the apparent absence of political boundariesespecially

The situation of the European Diaspora male Jew . . . as politically

enables incest, commands pleasure, disables sexual difference, and

murkiness. . . . Not exactly political exile. Voluntary . . . political exile.9

through marriage into a capitalist fortune and concludes, society is only a

The parallel between this relationship and Freuds account of cathexis is

Of course, we might observe, following Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

that commands jouissance as a civic duty [though civic] is . . . an

intervention of the phallus would effectively sequester being, compensate

Meanwhile, in the protracted absence of the phallus, Daddy acquires

Daddys persistence in the imaginary ironically precludes both the

I dont even recognize my own body!!! . . . and it doesnt matter!!! . . . I

underscoring Abhors limited access to the symbolic, to the world of signs,

Traditional cultures and social organizations are destroyed in capitals

Acker (2004), a discussion in which the ongoing segmentation of labor

Leaving aside gaps in Clunes analysis, including even his inattention to

sovereignty by virtue of his allegiance nowhere and, indeed, would seem,

response to incest, among other incursions, as well as a repudiation of

Worthington is headed toward a feminist translation of Kant, Foucault, and

anticipates the figures Acker dramatizes and critiques in Empire.

against the idea. Driven into exile, it is as if he were almost demonstrating

In this gloss, Rose offers a perspective on the paradoxical appeal and

talk of the postmodern predicamentbelonging everywhere and nowhere

In my fathers desk I discover . . . a honeymoon journal kept by my father

Interior. He was architect of the preliminary papers establishing statehood

redefining their parents identities by baptizing each family Silverman. I

America,34 where we translate difference into our own idiomeffecting

purposes, incest makes Irwin Silverman a pirate and America obsolete.37

communicate without the phallus; while this is a common feminist trope

of the West (this last incarnation of homo sacer) appears as a threshold of

unconscious, knowing more than it knows it knowsfull knowledge

simultaneously. Obviously well acquainted with postmodern and political

a discontinuous and fragmented series of self-enclosed barriers that can be

Agambens analysis and perhaps even Worthingtons discussion and,

Palestinians are right to question whether it would not be better if the

In Weizmans curious proposal to cede authority where it allows sovereign

Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge,

University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

1. Somerville, Sexual Aliens, 75.

25. Irigaray, This Sex, 100.

48. Ibid., 177.

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